Does the US need to ‘queer’ its nuclear arsenal?

Is it time to ‘queer’ the world’s nuclear weapons? This seems to be the view of a newly hired expert in the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) – the body in charge of maintaining the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

A few months before she was hired by the Biden administration in February, Sneha Nair co-authored a lengthy article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled, ‘Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament’. It pushes heavily for the use of ‘queer theory’ in developing US nuclear-weapons policy.

According to Nair and her co-author, ‘diversity and inclusion’ are ‘especially important’ for nuclear policy. Apparently, ‘discrimination against queer people’ can ‘undermine nuclear security’ and increase the risk of nuclear war. They also lambast the nuclear-security community for being largely ‘cis-heteronormative’ – for those not up on the queer vocabulary, that means filled with straight men who identify with their birth sex.

Anticipating their critics, the article hits out at those who – heaven forbid – might think ‘queerness’ is a ‘non-issue’ in the nuclear-weapons field.

Arguably, however, the push to ‘queer’ America’s nuclear stockpiles is far worse than a mere waste of everyone’s time. Nair writes that the ‘queer lens’ can help to deconstruct the ‘abstract idea of national security’. In other words, the point of ‘queering’ nuclear policy seems to be to undermine the very purpose of the NNSA in maintaining national security.

Time and again, we see how critical wings of the state are captured by identity politics and then corrupted from within. Not even the once hard-edged military or the CIA are immune to the woke virus. Diversity and inclusion seem to have replaced defence and national security as their overriding goals.

That such weapons-grade idiocy has infiltrated the very institutions in charge of the West’s security ought to worry us all.

Rosie Norman is an intern at spiked.